Information on working terriers, dogs, natural history, hunting, and the environment, with occasional political commentary as I see fit. This web log is associated with the Terrierman.com web site.

Tuesday, November 27, 2007

The Liberal Case for Gun Ownership

Yesterday morning Redskins football player Sean Taylor was shotby a burglar trying to break into his Miami home in the early morning hours.

All day yesterday, Taylor was in critical condition and the situation was the talk of the town here in Washington, D.C. where guns are already an ongoing topic of conversation thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to review the 31-year old D.C. handgun ban.

We are going to hear a lot about guns in the next few months and most of it will be "sound and fury signifying nothing."

The simple truth is that guns are here to stay, like it or not.

And, as shocking a piece of news as this is to some people, guns are not all about hunting; self-defense is (on very rare occasions) an acceptable reason to draw and fire a gun.

The odd thing about guns in the debate about Presidential candidates is that there is not much any presidential candidate can do (or should do) about them.

After all, Congress makes the laws, and the Courts interpret them. A President has no role in changing or interpreting the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. We are not a monarchy, and no one is electing Rudy Giuliani, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, or Mitt Romney king.

That said, the gun debate will be fought, so as we enter the debate season, let’s review the numbers and the history.

Let me make that number a little more meaningful: If you stand in front of your house and look at the house to the immediate left and right, there's an almost 100% chance that one of these three abodes has at least one gun inside.

And yet, for all that, I am willing to bet that no one was shot on your block this week, this year, or in your lifetime.

The biggest caucus on Capitol Hill is the Congressional Sportsmen's Caucus with 300 members in 46 states. These folks represent the interests of America’s hunters and anglers, and this is the most important environmental caucus on Capitol Hill. And, for the record, they are almost all strong supporters of the Second Amendment

More than a few members of the U.S. Supreme Courtare hunters and gun owners, as are a tremendous number of lower-court judges. In fact, it's estimated in judicial newsletters that up to 25 percent of all judges in some states have a concealed weapons permit.

Judges may look down their nose at crime, but a lot of them also look down the barrel of a gun once in a while, and self-protection arguments for gun ownership do not necessarily fall on deaf ears in court.

While guns are intrinsically dangerous, people know that and, for the most part, act accordingly.

Guns -- and guns alone -- are considered inherently evil and sinister.

Each to his own, of course. If people want to demonize guns, there's not much you can do about it. Some people demonize wolves, bears and snakes as well. Others demonize religious or racial groups.

And yet, are we not Americans? The Ku Klux Klansman, the ACLU-card holder, the communist, the Gay Pride activist, the militant feminist, the vegan, the Orthodox Jewish Rabbi, the black Baptist minister, the union-card boiler maker, and the retired Colonel in the U.S. Marine Corps all may differ from each other in terms of race, religion, and politics, but they all believe in the First Amendment.

You do not need to be Mormon to respect the concept of separation of Church and State, nor do you have to be a hate-spewing Klansman to value free speech.

By the same token, you do not have to own guns or even like guns to respect the Second Amendment.

What were our Founding Fathers thinking when they wrote the Second Amendment?

Well, they were not engaged in narrow partisan politics. They were not posturing for Fox News or trying to “make nice to soccer moms.”

”With Michael Savage and Ann Coulter openly calling for putting liberals in concentration camps, with the CIA now licensed to secretly detain American citizens indefinitely, and with the current administration effectively legalizing torture, the proper question to ask an NRA members these days may be 'What kind of assault rifle do you think I can get for three hundred bucks, and how many rounds of ammo does it take to stop a born-again Homeland Security zombie from putting me in a camp?'

"Which would you prefer, 40 million gun-owning Americans on your side or theirs?"

Bageant is not a new liberal, but an old liberal – the kind that once protested things and took to the streets in opposition to stupid wars, and which stood up to be counted when civil rights were being violated.

The old liberals know the value of guns.

They know that after the Civil War, southern whites denied blacks the right to own guns, because it was easier to lynch an unarmed black man than it was one who owned a deer rifle and 200 rounds of ammunition.

"Thirty-one states allow all qualified citizens to carry concealed weapons. In those states, homosexuals should embark on organized efforts to become comfortable with guns, learn to use them safely and carry them. They should set up Pink Pistols task forces, sponsor shooting courses and help homosexuals get licensed to carry. And they should do it in a way that gets as much publicity as possible."

If this sounds like Revolutionary talk, it is. It is the kind of language our revolutionary Founding Fathers might have used if they were gay, or black, or Hispanic, or Muslim, or Jewish and living in America today.

”Don’t Tread On Me,” was not a bumper sticker back then – it was a warning every bit as ominous as the shake of a rattlesnake’s tail.

The notion that our Founding Fathers contemplated armed insurrection inside the United States seems to surprise some people.

But it shouldn’t.

The Good Old Boys of Virginia -- Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and George Washington -- knew that power belonged to the people only so long as the power of the state could be met with an equal power organized by the populace at large working in tandem.

Guns were not to be used capriciously, but they were part of the long term plan crafted by our Founding Fathers to protect this great nation from powerful, cunning and patient forces of oppression -- whether those forces came from within or without.

But of course the Second Amendment was not just about securing freedom at the national level. It was also about securing some modicum of personal protection at home as well.

Our Founding Fathers were not living "on the grid."

In 1776, you could not dial up a patrol car and expect someone to show up at your door a few minutes later.

On the empty plains and in the dark woods, it was every man for himself, and a prudent person was both well-armed and quite cautious.

But, to tell the truth, is it really that different today? If you are a suburban housewife, or a well-heeled lawyer with cable television in the den and GPS in your Mercury Mountaineer, you may not know what it feels like to live 20 miles outside of town and up a dirt road. But if you spend some time out on a farm, and also happen to be a member of a religious or racial minority, you may come to a whole new world of understanding.

"Michelle, my wife .... was driving through this nice, beautiful area, going through all this farmland and hills and rivers and she said 'Boy, it's really pretty up here,' but she said, 'But you know, I can see why if I was living out here, I'd want a gun. Because, you know, 9-1-1 is going to take some time before somebody responds. You know what I mean? You know, it's like five miles between every house.'”

Yeah, I know what you mean.

But guns are not just a rural security need. There is, argueably, a place for a gun, even in top-end homes in Miami. Homes like that of Sean Taylor.

And what if you are one of those poor unfortunates living in a down-at-the-heels neighborhood? Don’t these folks have security needs that trump those of rural Iowa farmers?

"Most liberal antigun advocates do not get off the city bus after working the second shift. Nor do they duck and dodge from street light to street light at 1 a.m. while dragging their laundry to the Doozy Duds, where they sit, usually alone, for an hour or so, fluorescently lit up behind the big plate-glass window like so much fresh meat on display, garnished with a promising purse or wallet, before they make the corner-to-corner run for home with their now-fragrant laundered waitress or fast-food uniforms. Barack Obama never did it. Hillary Clinton never did it. Most of white middle-class America doesn't do it either. The on-the-ground value of the Second Amendment completely escapes them."

To which I can only add that Rudy Giuliani never rode the City Bus at midnight either. Neither did Mitt Romney. Or Sarah Brady. And all of them are Republicans.

The point here is that the gun issue is not about Democrats vs. Republicans, or liberals vs. conservatives, or even rural residents vs. urban residents.

It's about something deeper and more important than that: it’s about empathy and respect and tolerance.

It’s about recognizing that not everyone goes to nine-to-five jobs in air conditioned offices while commuting down safe suburban streets.

It’s about recognizing that not everyone can afford to have an ADT alarm system installed in their house.

And, most important of all, it’s about not living in fear of the fact that people who look different from you, who think different from you, and who pray different from you, may have rights too.

And not just First Amendment Rights, but Second Amendment rights too, including the right to protect their house and home from invasion and robbery.

But if everyone has guns, won't we all live in fear? Won’t small altercations inevitably rise to violence due to the close proximity of weapons? And what about school shootings?

Well, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office, guns help prevent crime.

Approximately 2.5 million Americans protect themselves with guns every year. Most of the time, the gun is never actually fired –- it is simply brandished, and the person breaking and entering is told to “get the f*ck out of here” and that’s exactly what happens.

Job done.

Yes, citizens do occasionally shoot and kill people while defending themselves and their property. In fact, citizens shoot and kill twice as many criminals as police do every year.

In short, guns are routinely used to deter crime, but these guns are rarely fired. When citizens do fire a gun to deter crime, they are rarely acting like Yahoos.

Which is not to say that Yahoos, criminals and crazy people do not exist; they certainly do. But these people exist with or without guns, and are a danger to us all, with or without a gun.

Remember, Yahoos in cars kill far more people than Yahoos with guns.

And as for criminals, do you really think they are going to be deterred by gun laws? Have these people been deterred by our drug laws, our murder laws, or our robbery laws? Why would the gun laws be treated with any more respect?

As for the shooting of small children, both in and outside of school, the phenomenon has never been common, and the numbers are going down.

New York City -- ground zero in the war against guns -– has 2.6 million children under the age of 10 and approximately 3 million guns owned by adults.

17 comments:

H Houlahan
said...

Since this is a dog blog, I'll take the moment to connect the dots to dog ownership.

Everything Patrick has said about guns is true of dogs, only more so.

Dogs bite. A few people a year are actually killed by dogs in this country. There are powerful forces of hysteria that call for bans and Hannibal-Lector containment systems for all dogs, or dogs of certain breeds, every time some yutz lets his semi-feral monsters rampage.

When I was looking for renter's insurance and owned a single German shepherd, I found an agent who knew the score, and represented it as the unstated common wisdom at State Farm: Yes, they pay out a lot on dog bites every year, but they also know that they are *not* paying out claims for burglaries to thousands of other policy holders.

I just listened to a gut-wrenching "This American Life" program (have I adequately outed myself as a Pelligrino Pinko here?) that recounted the brutal murder of a man's mother in a "burglary" gone south. He spoke to the driver/lookout at the prison many years later, and the man recalled how the first house that the two killers targeted was deemed unacceptable because it had a big scary dog. Guys brutalized and shot two women, no problem -- but they don't wanna mess with no DOG. That dog's owners lived that day -- maybe they never knew what a five-minute barking jag accomplished.

Anyone who is undeterred by my German shepherd (the pointy-eared visual) and small pack of English shepherds (the real muscle and teeth of the operation -- don't be fooled by that Gund-toy appearance) is a very bad actor indeed. We keep the guns (hunting arms, but there are a few rounds of buckshot handy) well-secured; I figure that with a bad guy of this sort -- say, Ann Coulter in a 'roid rage slouching up my driveway -- the dogs will buy me enough time to access and load.

Unfortunately, the FF never foresaw the efforts of simpering safety-addicts to deprive Americans of the most effective home-security system ever devised.

Yup. Self-defense isn't a Republican right, or a political right right -- it's a fundamental human right, and while handguns are hardly the only tool that one can use in self-defense, they're an important one.

I like the graphic -- I sense Oleg's involvement. (The world's a twisty place -- as it turns out, I was the guy who first Oleg shooting.)

I love this blog entry - it is the best piece I've ever read about the gun control/laws. Terrierman, you are my hero! I'm gay, and I believe in the right to bear arms - so I count myself as a libertarian rather then a liberal. Because, crunchy hippie granola lefties sneer at me and my support of every American's right to reasonable access to guns (just be of legal age, mentally stable, and shown to be safe and competent by an exam for your licence).

This reminds me of Penn & Teller's B.S. ep on Gun Control where they suggested that the government give every woman a gun, to do with as she sees fit. If they want to give them away or destroy them, so be it, but attacks on women will drop drastically when there's a 50/50 chance that she's armed.

All Americans should be reading this. My belief is that we should hand out guns at graduation in High School and every person should get one with the proper training and shooting class and then it is up to them whether they carry it daily or not but I doubt many people would admit to not carrying it.

I am more than OK with people not having guns, same as I am more than OK with people not having televisions or cars. I am also OK with people who do not hunt and who only eat granola, people who pray to different Gods, and people who wear odd clothes or are members of different political parties.

The liberal case for gun ownership is, fundamentally, about tolerance; about recognizing that there is a Constitutionally guaranteed right here that needs protection, and that it's not a one-size-fits-all country.

Same as the First Amendment.

Rights are not a popularity contest, nor are they a fashion statement. You do not have to yell racial epithets and hate speech to believe in the First Amendment, and you do not need to load your own bullets in the basement or be a subscriber to "Soldier of Fortune" in order to believe in the Second Amendment.

Mandating gun ownership is to miss the point: what makes America great is both the freedom to choose AND the requirement that we respect the choice of others. That includes choice of politics, choice of religion, choice of words, and yes, even the choice to own a gun OR NOT.

On a different note, I would urge folks to read the excellent piece by Eugene Robinson at The Washington Post (see "When Did the Victim Become the Murderer" at >> http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20071130_when_did_the_victim_become_the_murderer/ )

Robinson notes how many folks have been slow to speak up for the victim in this crime. That sad fact has been true on both the right and the left.

As Robinson notes:

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

"[W]hat fascinates me is how eager people were to believe the worst about Taylor—how ready to stuff a young man’s death into a box labeled 'pathology' and call it a day—in the absence of supporting factual evidence.

"Apparently, 'innocent until proved guilty' doesn’t apply to young black men even when they’re the victims of violent crime.

"The few facts we have, in fact, tell a story that’s very different from the chosen narrative. Sean Taylor is hardly a typical product of those fabled 'mean streets' - he grew up with his father, a suburban police chief, in a middle-class neighborhood. He did spend weekends with his mother in a tougher area, though, and acquired some sketchy friends. But at the same time he was attending an exclusive private high school, where he met his girlfriend, Jackie Garcia, a niece of the actor Andy Garcia.

Yet, how many people have somehow suggested, soto voce, that he somehow "deserved" it for being young and black and occassionally hot headed? A lot. There is a great sadness that even in death, we do not allow people to have the dignity of having original stories; everything has to fit some pre-existing frame or script.

Read the whole thing at the link above. Robinson is on his game with this piece!

I thought that my use of the term 'crunchie hippie granola lefties' was pretty obviously pointing out the extreme folks on the left. People that are probably PETA or Greenpeace supporters. Not average people that consider themselves liberals. I'm sorry if this was construed as being intolerant.

More aptly, I was trying to make the point that rarely do the majority of Americans fall neatly into Right or Left. Most people have different views on different issues. Even if you're part of a minority that is usually considered liberal, such as being gay, that doesn't mean that you're not concerned about the finances of this country, the military having enough resources to do their job or responsible gun laws.

Nor I am suggested that we mandate gun ownership; however, training to defend yourself (in whatever way you choose) is a lot better way to deter or survive an attack on your person then just hoping that you won't ever be victimized. I brought up the Penn & Teller piece as a dovetail to the Pink Pistols bit of the article.

Above all, I was really trying to show that you have a diversified readership, Terrierman.

After I wrote this piece, by the way, I learned that one of the complaintants in the DC gun case is, in fact, gay and a professional libertarian working for the Cato Institute. A profile piece in the Blade can be found here >> http://washingtonblade.com/2007/3-23/news/localnews/10249.cfm , and his personal web site (which looks to be pretty good!) is at >> http://www.tomgpalmer.com/

My comments about tolerance (or intolerance) for gun owners and non-owners was actually addressed to the anonymous person who posted just prior to my comment, and who suggested that guns be handed out at High School graduations. It's an odd idea and (as the father of two young adults) a very bad one.

Young people are very often idiots (their brains are not yet fully formed) who make HUGE mistakes and who generally respect very little that is given to them on a plate. Giving guns to every teenager in America upon high school graduation is likely to result in endless tragedy.

Besides, who thinks we should have a give-away program for anything?? We don't hand out cars, television sets or refrigerators at High School graduation. Why would we hand out guns?

And then it occured to me that a very common confusion had occured, and perhaps it should be pointed out -- the notion that because people have a "right," they also have an obligation.

Owning a gun does not create a right; the right exists whether you own a gun or not, just like the right to free speech exists whether you say something controversial or offensive or not.

This concept is too often missed on both the right and the left. You can see the slip in the recent Republican "Youtube" presidential debate when someone wanted to know if the candidates owned guns and what type. What did that matter? Owning a gun is not a prerequisite for supporting the Second Amendment. Yet, for a lot of folks, that seems to be the assumption. It's an odd thing and quite unique to the Second Amendment. I am not gay, but I support gay rights. I am not a socialist or a libertarian, but I support the right of people to join whatever political organizations they want. I am not a Mormon or a Muslim (or much of a Christian if truth be told), but I am a big supporter of the First Amendment on religious grounds, and I believe in separation of Church and State. I eat meat, but I support the right of Vegans to say no and restrict their own diet anyway they see fit.

With guns however, the message of nongun owners seems to be that"Because I choose to not own a gun, EVERYONE ELSE has to not own a gun so I can feel safe." Conversely, the message of some gun owners (apparently) is, "I choose to own a gun, so everyone should too."

I came here from the War On Guns site by David Codrea. Thankyou for this post. I know there are others, but I so seldom read those other opinions, that I sometimes get the impression that Liberal and Antigun are one and the same. And no, it is not because of lack of seeking, but because they are simply not out there. I would encourage more people to express those opinions more frequently, and more forcefully.

As for the dogs, I know it's a lot of work, and probably a labor of love.

That is the single most inspiring thing I have read on any blog in a long time. It is very easy for conservative folks like me and those who frequent the kind of blogs I enjoy to talk about guns but hearing it eloquently put from somebody who is on the opposite end of the political spectrum was great. It makes me think that some liberals have common sense after all.

I've owned both dogs and guns for most of my adult life.On 3 occasions (that I know of) the dog(s) aborted a crime in progress. On four occasions a gun did the same. Most of these were violent attack attempts. Two were burgalary attempts.I've lived in bad inner-city neighborhoods for most of my adult life, and not being well-off enough for a burgalar alarm system I have never had my house robbed. I attribute this to two things: a dog, and a small practice-target taped to my (glass) front door with a nice, tight pattern of 9mm holes in the center. At the time I was using this last deterrent I lived in a bungalow court in Los Angeles. There were 10 units. All but one of the others was burglarized at least once while I lived at that address. My dog was a 40LB Collie mix. I have found that when out walking with my dog at night, (I currently own a 45LB Border Collie) people don't screw with me. She is off-leash, and very observant. If someone seems too attentive to my movements I call the dog, put her in a sit, and say "Watch 'em." This last is solely for the potential creep. It means nothing to the dog - she would be watching them anyway. But I have found that unsavory types who observe a dog responding quickly to a "sit" or a recall, will make the assumption that the dog is also trained to attack. Try it sometime... They just slope off and look for someone accompanied by fewer teeth.